Content

This work, so full of biological references, charms, voices from the natural world, is a memorable first collection. From its opening poem, ‘Bats’, which, like ‘Hare’, deals with creatures popular in contemporary poetry, Sarah Westcott’s surprising imagery, ‘wombed and jeweled / with kidneys, ovaries, / rows of studded teats.’; arresting language, ‘turning widdershins,’; and chilling, ‘…you’ll feel / our hunting song across your teeth’, sets the tone for the way she exposes similarities between humans and other animals, and reveals her keen eye and depth of scientific knowledge.

The collection is carefully composed with poems highlighting human characteristics placed beside poems which reference to animals and plants: ‘Inklings’, dealing with conception, rejoices in creation, ‘moulding them out of our hearts like clay,’, but is also visceral ‘and thighbones working like engines all greased with blood and longing,’ comes immediately after ‘Bats’.

As a non-biologist, despite the use of language such as ‘mycelium’, ‘hyaline’, and sporocarps’ (‘Downy Mildew’), I didn’t feel alienated from content, I was taken down the microscope, and pleasure in language, a playfulness in parts, ‘epithelial with a tensile foot / like a surfboard with nerves.’ (‘Form’) draws the reader into the work.

The poems deal with opposites and contrast: conception, in ‘Lily’, ‘Inklings’, and ‘Sentinel’ (concerned with chance, ‘how one seed might pierce its seamless skin, / set it dividing, tumbling into a stranger, strange as the man in the moon, the women / three-mothers-back, …’); miscarriage, in ‘Little Red’; and death in ‘The Green Flash’.

In poems which explore and reveal plant and animal life, we are taken into a wildness; whilst those written from a human perspective reveal focus on a taming of wildness, present for instance in ‘Black and Blue’, here there is a conflict between love and duty, apparent also in ‘The Faithful Couple’.

I loved ‘Lily’: in just ten lines, Sarah combines the keen observation of the botanist with the skilled use of metaphor, ‘ planting deep gold, / seeds that will root and bloom / into white lilies…’ In poems which make use of anthropomorphism, a biologist’s wonder is revealed alongside the empathy of a poet. A potent mix.

Throughout the work, there is a quest for an answer to questions about ourselves, ‘…in stars and tides, in the past and in ‘a dialogue between bar codes and desire’. [‘We are Listening’]

I’ve read three previous collections from Pavilion Press and each has been memorable for its precision, craft, and unique voice. Sarah Wescott’s collection is no exception. There is so much more I could comment on: the cover and font using harmonious shades of green – so fitting given the content; the dimensions of the collection making it so portable; the pace, tone, and form of each poem; further discussion of voice. However, there are limitations here, so I aim to just whet your appetite and recommend ‘Slant Light’.

In forty-nine carefully wrought fluent poems, the longest of 30 lines, When the Tree Falls communicates space left by the poet’s father within the family, the home, and the land he farmed. In so doing, Jane Clarke shows how an integrated life, though unremarkable to many, is woven into so many aspects of other people’s lives in the family and outside, into life cycles, the fields, and animals.

The first of the spare, carefully formed sequence of poems is an elegy to the father constructed with repetition touching on the natural world and the life that the father had. The poems follow the journey of the man moving away from the home in which he lived,

‘in the house where he was born//
and swore he would never leave.
...He stood at the top
of the stairs in a fever that came on him
as fast as nightfall in winter,’

[‘He stood at the top of the stairs’]

A sequence of poems is deftly constructed around images of a stick, a rod, a scythe. Even poems linked to hospital use metaphors of the land and farming, for instance, in ‘That I could’, there is, ‘the digging for a vein in his arm,’. Throughout, metaphors of nature are knitted into references to the man described as, ‘horse chestnut petals falling pink in the yard, / the well hidden in a blackthorn thicket.’ (‘That I could’)

The collection contains a sequence linked to the poet’s mother (nine poems from ‘Metastasis’ to ‘Mammogram’). Here we see Jane Clarke’s subtle use of land as metaphor,

‘The way couch grass takes hold of a garden,
spreads seeds, runners, white rhizomes
long before we notice, the way it grows//
more tenacious when we begin to dig.’

[‘Metastasis’]

The poet narrator’s difficult relationship with her mother is expressed in poems such as ‘Camping at Bearna’, a poem in which the mother’s unbending nature, reinforced also in ‘Point of Departure’, is revealed,

‘My father is taking me to the train
because my mother can’t; her heart
is broken over what I told her.’

Despite the apparent difficulties, Jane Clarke reveals a tenderness for her mother, painting her portrait in ‘Hers’ which begins with an expression of intimacy, ‘My mother said she knew, just knew I was going to be a girl,’ and throughout the poem the secret domain of how a woman cares for a home, ‘She taught me her tricks of the trade.’ However, we’re left with the sense that the poet narrator has or will have no use for these tricks.

Jane Clarke’s wonderful metaphors texture the collection, ‘Ballymoe Church is tumbling now, stone by stone,’ (‘Promise’). Here, as in many poems, she conflates the external world, often the land, with the experience of her parents. This happens again in ‘Cypress’ in which a tree

‘...survived
every winter’s wind,
its trunk ridged
as a raised bed ready for seed,
... exposed roots,
worn bare as bones,’

I can’t recommend highly enough this sensitive, thought-provoking, and ultimately life-affirming collection.

There’s no ordained route through bereavement, and Mona Arshi’s latest collection, Dear Big Gods, continues the elegy and memorial for her brother Deepak, started in her 2014 work, Small Hands.

In this second collection there’s a reflection on the five-year anniversary, ‘Five-Year Update’, a poem turned 45 degrees due to its line length, yes, but also mirroring the way Arshi visits and experiences the separation from her brother from every angle in this book. The poem is written with the intimacy of a letter, ‘I hope it’s fine to contact you, to tell you that I still watch the gaps in the carriages’. She refers to him as, ‘O supersonic boy’, and reveals the continual presence of her brother, how she relives not only the loss, ‘Five years ago the American women overheard my call just before Colchester.’, but also incidents from their lives, ‘remember we counted yellow cars in our Fiat 128,’.

In addition to the unusual layout of Five-Year Update, Arshi uses a variety of forms and layouts to emulate grief and loss. I had a sense that the range is akin to a search to express the unspeakable from many perspectives (‘The Humble Insistence’ is right-justified; ‘Tanka: I Loved You Best in Spring’; ‘Something’, in two columns’; ‘Dear Big Gods’ right-justified and indented.)

Throughout the collection Arshi gives a sense of her brother’s presence becoming more pervasive. An omnipresence is hinted at in flashbacks in for instance, ‘The Wasps’, and there’s a sense of porosity between this world in which she’s living and the afterlife. She communicates this powerfully in poems such as, ‘A Pear from the Afterlife’, “Too bad you have to go back,’ I say, / and he sighs like an old man’; and in ‘Everywhere’,

After rain, we lift up sheets of
canvas, nothing stirs,
like our own private church.
We expect no answer –
though he must be there.

Poems stagger between the liminal entering and leaving the world, ‘Ask anyone who’s experienced birth pangs or / reverse birth pangs’ (‘Because you left no note’)

A sense of lamentation is created through the repetition of motifs of fruit, flowers, and creatures: ‘Narcissi’; ‘The Lilies’; ‘The Wasps’; ‘Fish’; ‘A Pear from the Afterlife’; ‘In Mexico the women are marrying trees’; ‘Now I know the Truth about Octopuses’; ‘The Mango’; ‘Let the Parts of the Flower Speak’; and ‘Pomegranate’.

Dear Big Gods explores aftermath: the continued elegy, prayers, memorial; and a deepening of the presence of the lost one. Grief is personal and specific, and Arshi successfully and movingly immerses us in her unique experience of loss. It’s a book for both those who have read, Small Hands and those new to Mona Arshi’s writing.

The poetry collection, After Cézanne, an illustrated meditation on Cézanne’s life is unlike any other I’ve reviewed. The book has a substantial Foreword written by Art Historian Christopher Lloyd, an essay in itself outlining Cézanne’s temperament, passion, and struggles confirmed and asserted through the poetry later, ‘In a rage with everything, exhausted / and defeated by working on the mountain,’ (‘Cézanne in the Studio’)

‘Angle End’, and ‘Round the Block’, each almost voyeuristic and concerned with an overview of a neighbourhood, are accessible poems which hold more than is initially apparent beneath the surface. Both poems made me want to write on a similar theme. The rhythm of ‘Round the Block’ had me almost reaching for my trainers ‘…anti-clockwise: / fourteen minutes on go-slow’, and I was left wondering about characters such as Mrs Bulgar, Mr Lamper, Grandad (from ‘Round the Block’), Dr Bilby, The Pope, and ‘The Heyworth-Harmers’ (from ‘Angle End’).

The poignancy of, ‘Professor Wright who cycled seven miles to work and / back each day, then one day only made it six miles.’ (‘Angle End’) and the ending of ‘Birthday Cards’, ‘I find the silliest, rudest, fattest one to send, / Doing my best to get hold of you.’ after its thought-provoking beginning, ‘ Today you’d be seventy if you hadn’t been / so overweight’, lingered.

The title poem with language such as stragglers, hardcore, eager beavers, party-goers, bang on, hover, dollar-hungry doppelgängers, and the wry comment that ‘Those People’, ‘…have it marked fluorescent for weeks in their diary / and make a mission of what to wear,’ is a wonderful example of Paul Stephenson’s acute observations, and he culminates in drawing the reader into the question, ‘…is there a name for them?’

I recommend ‘Those People’, a book to be savoured by reading with the same acute observation with which it was written.

Having kept diaries throughout my twenties coinciding with the births of my own children, I was especially keen to read Noctuary, and to reflect on the idea of writing at that liminal time before sleep or between bouts of sleep as is so often the case in the early years of being a parent. From this powerful beginning, trepidation about the man who replaces the dead father is established.

Sennitt Clough reveals terror as a consequence of menace, ‘...I bolt like a spooked horse / to the jackhammer of my father’s fists.’ (This Little House), and highlights menace through another image of a creature in ‘Portrait Of My Mother And Stepfather As Moths’. Creatures and nature are revisited to reveal how untamed forces are uncontrollable,

‘Even the river / puts on a sleek display
like a muscled creature / running dark
as a conscience / ...’     (Anguilla Anguilla)

The poems take the reader through the poet-narrators terrifying experiences which she faces, bears and overcomes and are uncompromising in exposing the brutality which is part of the men’s lives. From the first poem when ‘my mother’s new husband crept behind / with a cloth bag… slow, slow, grab.’ (Sightings), violence and abuse recur frequently,

‘..his knife dimpling
her throat, saying I’ll kill you and kill your
bastard of a girl.’  (Unmetered)

This violence crushes dreams and hopes,
Well-trodden lines on her palms lead me
down the grey, ruined streets of her previous lives, (The Mother);

‘and she looks out
of the window, dreams of places
she’s never been.’ (Bus Driver).

It is clear in the poems that for the mother and the daughter, dreams are distant and unfulfilled.

Sennitt Clough lifts the lid on hidden child abuse which children have to cope with (‘Germolene’, ‘And The Moon Up Above’), but must remain silent about, ‘...That I sense the glass / around my throat, the pin’s locking chafe.’ (The Glass Collar).

  Perhaps what is most tragic and most brutal is that the violence exploits the passion and longings in the young women, ‘Something flashed in your eyes, as you lower / yourself on me; attracts me like bait.’ (Bait).

The men are also ruined by their violence, with the lonely and wretched end of the bus driver alluded to in ‘its body is covered in patches of rust.’ (The Bus Driver), or committing suicide ‘And The Moon Up Above’, as well as the descent into alcoholism recurring throughout the poems.

Even the brutal stepfather had humanity in him, once. When he caught a linnet and was about to crush it,

‘but it was the small heartbeat
he felt through the gourd of his palm,
that made him set it free.’

(A Smallholding In The Fens).

Sadly, this spark of humanity is extinguished, and as a result, the mother and daughter live desperate lives at his hands. This uncompromising set of poems can’t help but arouse anger, even hatred, at the dark forces they lift the lid on, as well as the bleak desperation which traps the women in the cycle of abuse. And yet, for all that it is an uncomfortable read, it is important. It takes an accomplished poet to take the reader into this area and for them to leave disturbed, but certainly not depressed. Sennitt Clough does this, and more with her startling collection.

‘I touch his sleeve
and it comes to life,
like it’s full of swallows,

swifts, nightjars
nesting in its folds –’ ('Jacket'),
and,
‘I said everything I could before you stopped me,
sifted skin through hourglass after hourglass –’  

'Time Keeper'

The Skin Diary as a collection provides insight. It's a journal of survival despite loss, and closes with a charm-like poem,

‘…I plant for you / agapanthus, dahlia, harebell,’. Raw reality is contained between the imaginative, magical first and last poems. Throughout thoughts are raised about the power of the imagination, and of spell-like charms to help to elevate us above loss and longing.

Sightings, with its stark opening line of the title poem, informs us that we’re entering a narrative of loss, ‘After my father died...’, but a menacing threat is established too, and these powerful messages, the aftermath of the loss of a father and menace, are to be played out through scenes of contradiction, ‘...its song, a call / to summer from a November morning.’; an ‘...active hope / and hopelessness,’; ‘...Rarest of Gifts was lost,’.

From this powerful beginning, trepidation about the man who replaces the dead father is established.

Sennitt Clough reveals terror as a consequence of menace, ‘...I bolt like a spooked horse / to the jackhammer of my father’s fists.’ (This Little House), and highlights menace through another image of a creature in ‘Portrait Of My Mother And Stepfather As Moths’. Creatures and nature are revisited to reveal how untamed forces are uncontrollable,

‘Even the river / puts on a sleek display
like a muscled creature / running dark
as a conscience / ...’     (Anguilla Anguilla)

The poems take the reader through the poet-narrators terrifying experiences which she faces, bears and overcomes and are uncompromising in exposing the brutality which is part of the men’s lives. From the first poem when ‘my mother’s new husband crept behind / with a cloth bag… slow, slow, grab.’ (Sightings), violence and abuse recur frequently,

‘..his knife dimpling
her throat, saying I’ll kill you and kill your
bastard of a girl.’  (Unmetered)

This violence crushes dreams and hopes,
Well-trodden lines on her palms lead me
down the grey, ruined streets of her previous lives, (The Mother);

‘and she looks out
of the window, dreams of places
she’s never been.’ (Bus Driver).

It is clear in the poems that for the mother and the daughter, dreams are distant and unfulfilled.

Sennitt Clough lifts the lid on hidden child abuse which children have to cope with (‘Germolene’, ‘And The Moon Up Above’), but must remain silent about, ‘...That I sense the glass / around my throat, the pin’s locking chafe.’ (The Glass Collar).

  Perhaps what is most tragic and most brutal is that the violence exploits the passion and longings in the young women, ‘Something flashed in your eyes, as you lower / yourself on me; attracts me like bait.’ (Bait).

The men are also ruined by their violence, with the lonely and wretched end of the bus driver alluded to in ‘its body is covered in patches of rust.’ (The Bus Driver), or committing suicide ‘And The Moon Up Above’, as well as the descent into alcoholism recurring throughout the poems.

Even the brutal stepfather had humanity in him, once. When he caught a linnet and was about to crush it,

‘but it was the small heartbeat
he felt through the gourd of his palm,
that made him set it free.’

(A Smallholding In The Fens).

Sadly, this spark of humanity is extinguished, and as a result, the mother and daughter live desperate lives at his hands. This uncompromising set of poems can’t help but arouse anger, even hatred, at the dark forces they lift the lid on, as well as the bleak desperation which traps the women in the cycle of abuse. And yet, for all that it is an uncomfortable read, it is important. It takes an accomplished poet to take the reader into this area and for them to leave disturbed, but certainly not depressed. Sennitt Clough does this, and more with her startling collection.

‘I touch his sleeve
and it comes to life,
like it’s full of swallows,

swifts, nightjars
nesting in its folds –’ ('Jacket'),
and,
‘I said everything I could before you stopped me,
sifted skin through hourglass after hourglass –’  

'Time Keeper'

The Skin Diary as a collection provides insight. It's a journal of survival despite loss, and closes with a charm-like poem,

‘…I plant for you / agapanthus, dahlia, harebell,’. Raw reality is contained between the imaginative, magical first and last poems. Throughout thoughts are raised about the power of the imagination, and of spell-like charms to help to elevate us above loss and longing.

A QUIET EXCHANGE IN WORD AND IMAGE: REVIEW BY MARIA ISAKOVA BENNETT

The English River, a journey down the Thames in poems and photographs by Virginia Astley, 2018, 94pp, £12.00, Bloodaxe Books Ltd, Eastburn, South Park, Hexham, Northumberland NE46 IBS

Virginia Astley’s first collection is a journey both of the upper reaches of the Thames, and of an intimate relationship. Although many of the poems are personal, themes of loss and of a developing awareness of the self are universal.

This is my remembered landscape,

stored in my earliest self,
and all along, I have been re-winding, re-playing,
continuing this quiet exchange.   

                                    [‘I breathe as though I’ve been submerged 

                                      and am coming up for air’]

Music flows through this carefully formed and honed work in the way Virginia judges pace, tone and rhythm, and with references to aural effects perceived as music. In ‘Lammas Land’, ‘the lark cadenzas.’, in ‘I breathe as though I’ve been submerged and am coming up for air’, ‘…the bells can be heard / falling apart’, and in ‘Source’, the notes of a train are cited.  There are also direct references to music, for instance, ‘Chopin Opus 49’, the mention of which had me listening to the track as I read.

   Prayer, as with music, is both referenced directly, for instance in titles such as, ‘Sanctuary’, and in the content of poems, ‘there is the quiet of snow / and the quiet of church’ (‘I breathe as though I’ve been submerged and am coming up for air’). These motifs of prayer and music recur like echoes in a beautiful melody.

   The half-light of winter or early mornings is a frequent backdrop, ‘unable to sleep— the weir, the wind— / I’m walking the village before dawn,’ (‘Somewhere I’m not a blow-in’); ‘In the darkness you lie awake / hearing the front panes fret,…’, (‘Night Rain’). Virginia is sensitive to the fall and rise of light, and it’s these subdued parts of day and year that feature most in both poems and photographs.

   Intimacy is revealed through both memory and via dream references which Virginia uses skilfully, ‘I’m dreaming about you, / you’ve found me: at Michael’s / somehow trapped.’   (‘Old Songs’)

   Because of the quiet but passionate tone of the work, the more dramatic references in one of the pivotal poems placed at the centre of the collection are all the more arresting, ‘Your sister has married my ex, / the one I left for you;’, and, ‘But the last time I was in this house— / I can hardy speak— the last time, / was the day we buried you.’  (‘How did I ever think this would be OK?’), but even this poem is given space and quiet with use of em dashes and its gentle conversational tone. 

   These are quiet controlled poems inspiring a desire to visit the riverscape cited. Simplicity and an air of melancholy are complemented by photographs which enhance these qualities, photographs in which there’s no glare of sunlight, no dazzle. I highly recommendThe English River. It is best read and reread cover to cover, but each poem also stands alone, powerful in its own right, speaking directly of love and loss without succumbing to ornate or melodramatic language. I found myself breathing slowly as I read.

This is an impressive collection full of echoing motifs: birds flutter through the pages, references to anatomy abound, animal and human worlds collide, and poems move from air (for instance in 'Summer', 'Nesting in the wardrobe', 'Bleeding', 'The winter gatherer', and 'The Ice Hotel') to rain ('Summer’s end in Hackney', 'After you’ve died', 'Afterwards in ink', and 'Night planting'). The Skin Diary is a collection of poems, fifty-seven in all, which create a sense of emptiness and loss, starting as it continues with a sense of what is spoken at the end of the opening poem, ‘I miss you, I miss you.’ ('Before you write off your imaginary sister').

Loss, and the threat of it, permeates the collection. This loss is not focused on one person, rather it shifts and comes to settle variously on, for instance: the missing imaginary sister; an imaginary friend ('Losing Elena'); the ‘he’, and ‘you’ as an oncology patient (‘The Oncology Community'); ‘the lake of lost children’ (‘Counter turn’) and the stranger in the train whose funeral the narrator considers, ‘I can’t help wondering what name they’ll grind // on your gravestone,…’ (‘Paddock Wood to Charing Cross’).

The collection is punctuated with references to warnings of heartbreak ('The carrier bag', ‘Post-'), disappearance, drowning ('Mayday'), and death ('Pause’). These forebodings build tension and add poignancy to later poems in which disappearance or death are faced, ‘But this morning I lie awake // You’re still unvarnished, unravelled in my temporal lobe –', ('Forgetting you'); ‘We didn’t know how drunk you were / At St. Peter’s Bridge, standing on the edge’ ('Presence'); and in the extremely moving ‘text’, ‘But you weren’t back. Later. Or ever.’

The motif of eggs, and poems about fertility and fertilization, highlight another poignant loss. These poems are made beautifully memorable through references to the sea, '...You're the thinness / that laps shorelines at night when oceans / hanker after dunes, barge up beaches...'  ('Miracle').

Throughout, a sense of liminality and space is created, whether on a staircase such as in ‘Brighton flat’, ‘Last night’, or ‘Living with Bats’(‘I’m listening for your tread / on the stairs'), or in the raw exposure of the insides of the body in poems such as ‘The Archive of Lost Lives’, ‘After the funeral’, ‘The horologist and the body clock’, or in imagination akin to magical realism, 

‘I touch his sleeve
and it comes to life,
like it’s full of swallows,

swifts, nightjars
nesting in its folds –’ ('Jacket'),
and,
‘I said everything I could before you stopped me,
sifted skin through hourglass after hourglass –’  

('Time Keeper')

The Skin Diary as a collection provides insight. It's a journal of survival despite loss, and closes with a charm-like poem,

‘…I plant for you / agapanthus, dahlia, harebell,’. Raw reality is contained between the imaginative, magical first and last poems. Throughout thoughts are raised about the power of the imagination, and of spell-like charms to help to elevate us above loss and longing.

With its sensual language, Geraldine Clarkson’s second pamphlet draws the reader into its oneiric world. In ‘Nuala, Nuala, Nightwatchman’s Daughter’, ‘Days Round like the Moon’, ‘Triptych’, ‘Bridal’, and ‘the last thing’, the book has an artery of references to Christianity, more specifically Catholicism, and opens with a poem creating a sense of otherworldliness, ‘I had a red silk cloth for a mother / …We lived at the end of a / stick.’ (‘Biography’)

This otherworldliness continues in a myriad of ways throughout, and held me captivated even in places where I didn’t fully understand all I read. The reader is lured by the language, surreal qualities and unusual decisions in relation to punctuation (in ‘a young woman undressed me and’, there are no upper case letters, giving a sense of hastily recorded memories shared intimately).

Imagery is powerful and memorable and creates a sense of an inner world,

‘Last night I dreamt I was a cake, a squat brown gateau
dimpled with cherries above a piped creamy smile. Inside,
falling-away fudge, and smudgy…’ 

                                                (‘Mise en Gâteau’)

and,

‘she touched my lip with a shapely thumb: shhh …
don’t fret. her voice like jinxed june breezes
in lime leaves. and then. her voice like rills rushing over flint’  

(‘a young woman undressed me and’)

 There is a beautiful musical quality to the poetry, exemplified in the title poem,

‘… (they mate, like carapaces, in parentheses),
Dora feels coolness in new places, lifts a reused
razor shell, mother-of-pearly and straight’

(‘Dora Incites the Sea-Scribbler to Lament’)

and also in ‘A-Man-at- a-Bus-Stop sees a Perfect ‘O’’, where, in addition to the title, every line begins with ‘A’, followed by ‘m’, (Amanatta, American, ampersands, a mutilated, a mayfoil,  Amitriptyline, amateus, A.m.), and reaches a crescendo with ‘amo / amo / amo’.

Reading the poem has a dizzying effect and, placed as it is after two poems dealing with confinement, a sense of hope and playfulness.

It’s a book of contrasts between a sense of containment and freedom, between the inner and outer world, and explores female desire with emphasis on the female body (‘a young woman undressed me and’, ‘caress’, and ‘The thing about Grace and Laura’).

It’s a short but sumptuous pamphlet to be read in one go at first:  lose yourself in it, then return and peel back the layers, dive underwater, revel in the world, in the confinement and the escape.

Moniza Alvi’s book length poem in twenty parts, set in 1947 at the time of the partition of India and Pakistan, tells the story of a family’s migration to Lahore and is a lament movingly related which marries a personal story of loss with the fracture and trauma of a nation. 

The poem, with a steady pace generated by the use of short lined couplets which captures the sense of a journey, weaves historical fact, ‘Sir Cyril Radcliffe finalized the line / ... in the time / it takes to sort out a school timetable.’ (p. 12, The Line), stark fact about the change of religion in the city, ‘… the mass departure / of its Hindus and Sikhs, / to cope with the influx / of a million Muslim refugees.’ (p.46, On the Brink); with metaphor, ‘A line so delicate a sparrow might have / picked it up in its beak’  (p.12, The Line); and sums up how this beginning is an end too ‘…but for my grandmother / India draws away, irretrievably/ like the tide going out.’ (p.13)

Although predominantly structured in couplets, several sections end in single lines, creating a pause to reflect before moving onto the next section. For instance, ‘Lahore, still-beating heart of the Punjab,’ (p.47, On the Brink); and, ‘Nothing was certain.’ (p. 62, Continuing). Occasional use is made of single lines to create fracture and a sense of a chorus of voices, for instance at the loss of Athar,

‘We’re sorry they said,
the friends of friends.

So very sorry –
He isn’t with us –
He disappeared at –
He vanished between –
The last time we saw him –      

                                                 (p.39, The Camp)

One of the most powerful aspects of the poem is the use of contradiction and duality: ‘the-past-in-the-future’ (p.61, Continuing) ‘The risk of departing / and the risk of remaining’  (p.22, Ever After)

Alvi makes skillful use of repetition to create an incantatory effect. References to prayer, Allah, the sun, sky, and darkness, ‘Only the sun rose every day / with no sense of loss – / overcame its spectacular death / of the evening before.’ (p.46, On the Brink), along with a chorus of voices, form further refrains throughout the book. In Praying, reference to prayer becomes salvatory ‘she would build her house of prayer’, and ‘In the camp, the lifeline was prayer.’ (p.44)

It may seem strange to end my review of this book I highly recommend, with reference to the first section of the poem but the sense of an end being in the beginning was paramount to me as a reader. The first section, The Line, contains a seed of hope like a prophecy, ‘there will be a resurrection’; and although there isn’t what might be perceived as a happy ending to the poem; as we follow the grandmother’s story, her prayers and supplication, her movement through loss – from bewilderment – to ‘the fine escarpment of hope’ (p.61, Continuing), and the building of a life in Pakistan, there is a sense of some resolution in finding a new home, albeit not the same as that left behind, a sense reinforced by the repetition of lines from the first section, in the final section,  

‘A line so delicate a sparrow might have
picked it up in its beak’.  

                                                (p. 63, Crossing Back)

This review was originally published in Antiphon Issue 14

When I read Matthew Sweeney’s Twentyone Men and a Ghost, I understood his own comment, ‘The Men poems took me by surprise’. Although each man has characteristics which might seem familiar, aspects of a person we can recollect from experience in daily life, Sweeney’s men taken together are a menagerie, an image which is enhanced by the animals both familiar and exotic, which swarm through the book to an equally varied backdrop of music, taking in banjos, reggae and classical composers.