*****
Walking Away, Martyn Crucefix, £7, Dare-Gale, ISBN: 9781915968135
Foxglovewise, Ange Mlinko, £12.99, Faber, ISBN: 9780571393862
xxx[Also: Difficult Ornaments: Florida and the Poets, Oxford, ISBN: 9780197776551]
A Quarter Dead and Half Alive, Steve Denehan, £10, Renard, ISBN: 9781804471609
The Red Gate, John F. Deane (artwork by Tony Martin), £10, Guillemot, ISBN:
9781913749668. All reviewed by John Greening
Martyn Crucefix has come a long way since his remarkable Enitharmon debut, Beneath Tremendous Rain (1990). Learning, no doubt, from poetry he has since translated or adapted – notably Rilke, but also Peter Huchel, Rosalía de Castro and the Daodejing (more familiar as the Tao te Ching) – he has become more and more experimental, more complicatedly troubled. This was especially evident in his 2017 sequence A Convoy and in the beautifully illustrated Cargo of Limbs from Hercules Editions (2019), itself a version of Book Six of the Aeneid. Walking Away is more straightforward and in some ways a shift towards a major key, though the subject matter might make it appear otherwise. Even the tranquil landscape on the cover reminds us that Crucefix has always had a pastoral streak: he was, after all, brought up in the West Country, which features here a good deal, if elegiacally. The book is dedicated to his parents and it opens with a ‘Video Call’ full of tragi-comic touches (the camera is ‘angled so I catch only the crowns // of grey heads then a giant hand/reaches forward to re-adjust’) and ends with gracefully formal stanzas evoking a ‘provincial market town’ (Trowbridge, perhaps, near the Wiltshire village where Crucefix grew up?).
Fourteen of the pamphlet’s pages are occupied by the remarkable title sequence of four-line poems (drawing on ‘the vivid, condensed power of the haiku form’, as the blurb puts it, but each of a different syllable count) about the decline of the poet’s elderly mother, whose state is addressed more directly in the penultimate poem of the four in Walking Away: ‘My Mother’s Care-home Room (as Cleopatra’s Monument)’. She is portrayed unsparingly with ‘an Easter Island profile / gaunt and beaked’ but becomes a regal presence by the poem’s end as her son keeps his vigil with a final flourish of rhyme:
with all the helpless-
xxness of a Charmian
at the cooling feet
xxof her brave Queen
the asp flung down
xxbeneath the only chair
there has ever been
The title sequence, however, is the book’s great success, a brilliant series of vignettes, like theatre music without the play, set largely, it seems, during a period when the poet’s mother was in her own home. Some of these don’t feel like haiku, but others have that unmistakable, indefinable quality – perhaps to do with awareness of the seasons:
Turning in at your mother’s front gate
Eighty years at a stroke
Swifts no longer nesting
Crucefix knows how to find the Imagistic essence of a situation, as the form demands; and his gift for metaphor has always been considerable:
This week’s new dosette box
Grey windows not yet broken
Twenty-eight channels nothing on
Once you work out what a ‘dosette box’ is (one of those compartmentalized containers for daily tablets), the image here is potent and at least as good as ‘Petals on a wet, black bough’. For their full effect, these fragments do need each other, and they don’t often need such glossing. Take the next one, only the third in the sequence:
Telephone numerals are big and bold
The size of Scrabble pieces
A language you once knew
The brevity is fitting, since that’s often the way one communicates with those in decline; there is tea, a shared remark, more tea, a view of a lawn, knick-knacks on the mantelpiece, a car passing, a nap, a scratching mouse, ‘The clamour of carers / A microwave ping’. And while nothing connects with nothing, we are embraced by an intense emotion and a sense of an approaching end. Walking Away demands to be read.
*
Just before Faber brought out Foxglovewise, Ange Mlinko’s British debut poetry collection, OUP published her fascinating prose study of Florida and its poets. Difficult Ornaments opens with an essay on ‘Biological Ornament’ which is illuminating with regard to her own poetry – as is the whole book. Even without reading her thoughts on James Merrill, for example, the influence is evident, especially when she turns her naturalist’s eye to the people around her. Take the opening of ‘The Mechanicals’ , whose title is itself a Merrillian nod to the comic nuptial celebrations in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
‘Couples can wed at the Miami Zoo…’
She is laughing to her confessor,
a tight-swathed, foiling hairdresser
(whose biceps playing peekaboo,
as he parts and lifts and snips,
suggest the weight of the flattening iron
or the tensility in the ringlets of that siren
chatting about her upcoming trips)…
Mlinko is good at sustaining a light touch and there’s a great deal of sensuality in the poems, but essentially she is an intellectual poet – unashamedly so, in a way that only Americans seem to be able to manage without sounding like senior civil servants or retired English professors. In fact, Ange Mlinko is just such a professor based in Florida, though her poetry doesn’t come across as dry or academic (nor did Professor Housman’s, of course). She enjoys allusion, however, and even her collection’s title references Louise Glück’s poem, ‘Matins’. But she is less oblique than the late Nobel Laureate and allows herself a richer diction, more in the mould of Marianne Moore (who features in Difficult Ornaments) or Amy Clampitt. One imagines Mlinko preferring the aural extravagance of ‘bougainvillea’ to anything as plain as Glück’s ‘wild iris’, and this can occasionally tip over into mannerism.
‘A Midsummer Night’s Work’ (again the Shakespearian note) begins in (almost) terza rima:
Was it you, presenting in
the evening bougainvillea
as a hummingbird again,
voluptuary, dual,
febrile wings ashine
as a seamstress’s spool,
hovering over the bracts
with power tools to fix
a beam or caulk the cracks? […]
Has ‘voluptuary’ appeared in any poem since ‘Little Gidding’? And ‘ashine’ is certainly unexpected. This faintly gothic vocabulary seems apt enough for a ghost poem (‘seamstress’ is admittedly drowned out by ‘power tools’ before the arrival of ‘oleaginous’, ‘polyphemus’. ‘espaliered to Orion’), but it’s also one of Mlinko’s default styles. She relishes flamboyance and indeed there is a poem of that title, which begins with a boldness T.S.Eliot would have enjoyed –‘The lighthouse fruits like a bromeliad’ – but which might send the rest of us to Google.
Like Eliot, though, Angela Mlinko can find a plain clear voice when she needs it, as in the (almost) sonnets ‘To My Guitarist’ and ‘The Open C’, or in some of her travel poems (‘Lowcountry’) and less flowery botanical studies (‘Radishes’). She’s good at finding the best way to voice a topic. The end of her Covid vaccination poem, for instance, is pitch perfect:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx…Is what this says
that strangers are still good;
that when the stainless bandage falls
we are the beneficiaries, less of
new antibodies in the blood
than the ancient protocols
of principled and impersonal love?
This is the Mlinko I most enjoy, but readers will find in Foxglovewise a rich, playful blend of history, literature, mythology, botany, autobiography and above all attention to the genius loci. One of the opening group, ‘Art Tourism’, for example, offers ‘memories of being young here’ (she doesn’t specify where). There are poems set in Texas, Nicosia, Vienna, but predominantly Florida. A longish poem about Key West achieves a formal whimsy harking back to Wallace Stevens, another of the subjects in Difficult Ornaments. There is a sequence of witty sonnets imagining Chekhov in the Gulf of Mexico. This often bookish preoccupation with locality continues right to the final three poems: one about a Colorado amphitheatre, ‘The Stars over Red Rocks’; one describing an orange tree on a particular lot (in Florida, we guess); and finally one set in a burial ground ‘Where trees raise a toast,/blossoms brimming, to the height / at which a note will crack’. Elsewhere, we find the poet listening to a recording of The Iliad in a Scottish cemetery: her own poem’s sixteen lines draw power from the immediate location and from the contrast between a single name on a mariner’s grave and the ’unfamilial polysyllables’ of Homer’s catalogue of ships. Her miniature is full of subtle rhymes and lyric overtones, its localized inwardness a deliberate contrast to the epic’s onward-marching grand style. Whether her subjects interest readers or not, Mlinke’s formal ingenuity will keep them on their toes.
Foxglovewise includes several strong candidates for my fantasy anthology of Poems About the British Isles by Visiting Americans. The witty title poem is typical of her companionable, conversational, straightforward mode (something Merrill could do, though he was invariably distracted into a pun or an elaboration). The poet climbs a steep hill in Edinburgh (‘such nice paths.. for us unathletic folk’) grabbing at gorse and ‘trampling on foxgloves / electric with bees’, noting warning signs about Lyme disease, imagining her own death and mocking her own anxieties without quite dispelling them :
It wasn’t reassuring that I still had it in me
to stray off the map – ‘This is the hill she died on
… of a bee sting’ – as it said on the ticket
in her raincoat pocket – ‘off-peak single’.
Merrill would have loved that last detail. ‘Foxglovewise’ is one of the less ornate poems, but she’s most herself when there is the danger of an over-abundance, a plurality of things to list, whether flowers and birds, ‘Mermaids and Mangroves…’ or ‘Potatoes and Pomegranates’. Keats is an avowed influence as surely Gerard Manley Hopkins must also be, if only for the sheer delight she seems to find in the physicality and sensuality of word sounds. She is instinctively a Richard Strauss rather than a Palestrina. One chews the sweetness out of a Mlinko poem.
*
It’s hard to imagine a greater contrast than between the poetry of Ange Mlinko and that of Steve Denehan. Hers is florid Floridian; his the very definition of a plain style. If Mlinko’s poems are like those puppets in War Horse, where you see and relish the wizardry, then Denehan’s are naturalistic photos of real living creatures. A typical Denehan poem is pared back, understated: he wants the language to be transparent. Line breaks become crucial, as do tone and precision of observation. James Merrill is not within earshot (nor is any other formalist), but that may be the low sound of William Carlos Williams beating on the shore, or Creeley, perhaps, Levertov, William Stafford. Stylistically, there is little variety – something of a problem in a collection of two hundred pages (Denehan’s seventh, beautifully produced with French flaps and a striking wrap-around seascape on the cover). Yet, as with Stafford, whose output was uncollectably enormous, most of the poems entertain and compel. These are not chopped up Carver-esque short stories but there is often an anecdotal underpinning to the snatches of everyday life, or even a hint of folk-tale or fable . ‘Twine and Brown Paper’, in which the poet is given ‘a piece / of the night sky’, might be seen as a way of wishing for the cloths of heaven in a neon age.
Of course, for all my American comparisons, Denehan (based in Kildare) is working within a distinct Irish tradition. If he lacks the intensity of a John Montague, there’s something of those early Irish poems Montague translated. At any rate, his is not the Heaney or the Boland line, but a purer, less textured, unironic poetic that has become popular within Ireland. ‘Bright Blue’ begins simply and in the present tense (as Denehan invariably does):
There is a crowd
small but growing
looking out to sea
despite the storm
I walk over
collar up, head down
These are lines whose plainness would have unsettled many poets (me included), but they succeed, largely because of rhythmic control. The poem goes on to show people pointing; the speaker can’t see what at:
I look again
out to sea
nothing, nothing
something
a piece of wood
a strip of metal, maybe
a body
a body
a body
lifeless, far below
far away
unreachable
squinting, I see
long hair, a bright blue dress
the white of her face
the water rises
she rises with it
and we
can only watch
and point
and look away
The poem’s success (and we are only a dozen pages in) depends on human emotion, but also on playful details of layout (‘nothing, nothing // something’), a natural ear for the rise and fall, pause and progress of a sentence and the shift in word sounds (‘the white of her… the water…’). Such things one cannot teach and not every poet will even hear. Yet it is the essential ichor.
The stories Denehan tells are emotional, yes, but not sentimental and here he is again helped by economy of language. This is especially important in the many poems about family, whether his ageing father is recalling a long vanished seaside attraction (‘The Arcadia’) or his young daughter is being told, after seeing it on television, what a certain rude gesture means:
she uncurls herself
from me
gets up from the couch
walks to the door
turns, and
with dusky porchlight
all around her
gives me
the middle finger
The timing is impeccable, but the poem doesn’t end there. He adds, after an extra line break:
days, and whole lives
can hinge
on such things
Another poet might well have crossed out this coda as unnecessary and unachieved but somehow Denehan makes it work. This has a lot to do with alertness to a potential subject (as Heaney used to emphasize), being prepared to write about something one might have just smiled at and forgotten – such as the way ‘cat food slid out of its pouch / landing in his bowl / with a wet plop’. ‘School Visit, 24th October, 2019’ begins as an unpromising journal entry (‘I stood at the top of the class / thirty pairs of eyes on me / I clutched some notes on poetry / although what did I know, really’) but ends with ‘Just one last question’ and the poet’s own daughter shooting her hand up to say ‘I love you’ – again, reported quite matter-of-factly, yet it is very touching. It’s good to tug at a reader’s heartstrings; and it’s good to make them smile. Denehan is not the first poet to be helped by a comic gift, which here saves a few less convincing (mainly longer) pieces. These are not performance poems, yet one can imagine applause and laughter for the self-deprecating ‘Just an All-Round Good Guy’ or the wry ‘Judging a Poetry Competition’. Nevertheless, the device of a cute or bathetic finale can become repetitive.
The poems in A Quarter Dead and Half Alive (excellent title) are generally short and short-lined. But two hundred pages of formally unvaried poems some of which cover similar ground – that’s asking a lot, and a tauter collection might have been better. I often recall what an old gardening expert once wrote, that ‘growth follows the knife’. Knowing what to prune is the most important and the most difficult skill to learn as a poet – and it helps you grow. Denehan has for the most part learnt how to do it in his poems (except for a certain slickness in the way he closes them) but it applies to collections too. Good things and unexpected things are likely to get lost in such a huge book. Fortunately, these poems can be read quickly without damaging their impact. Easy poems, but not easily forgotten.
John F.Deane is a rather more senior Irish poet. An influential figure, a notable editor and translator, he is also very prolific, producing the kind of thematically linked sequences that make appealing pamphlets or chapbooks. He was born on Achill and his poems have returned repeatedly to that remote and glorious western outpost. Anyone landing at Knock airport in 2018 might have seen stacked up copies of his glossy illustrated collection, Achill: the Island (Currach Press) in the airport bookshop, confirming that poetry really is regarded differently in Ireland. This new (much smaller) hardback is less concerned with any particular location, but conveys a powerful sense of home: that real and symbolic red gate leads to a real and symbolic garden. Deane contemplates the trees and flowers and wildlife, but is drawn to the ocean, the cosmos, the vast, mysterious movements of the spirit.
A few place names do stand out: in ‘An Acorn’, for example, Deane actually mentions a village just a cycle-ride away from this reviewer’s desk:
These are the fields of Leitrim, and here
the wild meadow, grasses, with celandine, meadowsweet
and maidenhair…
Apple trees down by the red gate, a chestnut tree
from Herbert’s Leighton Bromswold, an oak –
thriving – from an acorn Heaney gathered by Thoreau’s
Walden Pond.
The presence of George Herbert shouldn’t perhaps be a surprise, since there was a ‘Letter from East Anglia’ (dedicated to Rowan Williams) in the excellent 2018 collection, Dear Pilgrims. That was from Carcanet, who have published most of the recent books; but Deane has had many publishers, including his own Dedalus Press. Cornwall-based Guillemot are known for their elegantly designed editions and The Red Gate is one of their loveliest, even dispensing with the distraction of page numbers. Those who own the Carcanet Selected and New Poems (2023) will already be familiar with the title poem and three others, but here they are joined by Tony Martin’s striking geometries, the whole thing a pleasure to handle.
Deane is a poet who makes no bones about his beliefs. In an age when faith is hard to express, he is passionately and publicly devout yet he seldom lets his devotions lure a poem from its true destination. He also makes sure that he varies his forms (a curious characteristic of deeply Christian poets). He has big, serious things to say (‘All day my soul was troubled’) though he likes to wear his heart on his sleeve. It’s refreshing and rare to read a poet so determined to celebrate, who marvels at the snow, is awed by the night sky ‘beautiful beyond thought’, who has a vision, a mystical visitation, and writes unabashedly of ‘faithfulness and love’. Every poem has a connection with the titular gate: in one, the Holy Ghost even slips through it. In another ( ‘The Summer of 2010’), Deane recalls ‘turning in again at the red gate’ with his partner, walking among flowers, ‘at peace together’, with empty ‘carrier-bags of grief’. If that choice of metaphor is questionable, his sudden resort at the end of the poem to Beethoven’s Ninth (‘the rhythms / inexorable, the key D minor, the harmonies assured’ is surely a case of the maestro looking too encouragingly at the brass. Yet classical music has long been a vital outlet for the poet’s feelings in his poetry (a 2015 collection was called Semibreve)
When Deane is more restrained, the poems flourish. ‘The Vibrant Colours’ – which will end with the raising of a glass ‘of gold-white wine’ to his beloved, who is planting hollyhocks – begins:
You were painting the old red gate
in Drumkeelanmore a more vibrant
red; I was watching you from the house
and my heart was singing Gershwin’s
‘Summertime’…
If the ‘fug of a pandemic’ hangs over this distinctive collection (as it has over those by so many others in the last five years), it is barely noticeable amidst the life and colour. There are the inevitable elegies that must thread the work of older poets, but nothing maudlin or especially self-indulgent; rather, this is bold, visionary work in which Deane does what a poet should, according to Rilke – praise.
*
John Greening, A Bridport, Arvon and Cholmondeley winner with over twenty collections, including From the East (2024) and The Interpretation of Owls: Selected Poems 1977-2022, he has edited Matthew Arnold, Geoffrey Grigson, Edmund Blunden, Iain Crichton Smith, U.A.Fanthorpe and a forthcoming Molly Holden. There have been several critical studies and anthologies, most recently (with Kevin Gardner) Contraflow: Lines of Englishness. His new book of essays, poems and photos is A High Calling (Renard) and his Rilke New Poems (Baylor) appears this autumn.
The High Window 