Eleanor Rees reviews new publications donated to the library:
Fractured Flights by Jacqueline Brown (Arc Publications)
Patterns in the Dark by Mary Sheepshanks (Fighting Cock Press)
The Constancy of Stone by John Duffy (Nepotism Press)
The Shut Drawer by Liz Almond (Arc Publications)
From a Cliff by Andy Brown (Arc Publications)
New and Selected Poems by Sarah Day (Arc Publications)

Fractured Flights Jacqueline Brown
ISBN 1 900072 36 X
Published 2002     44pp      £5
Arc Publications, Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road, Todmorden, Lancashire OL14 6DA, England

'She tries to tell Michael how it felt / to be nothing, just an excuse for a picture.' This simple phrasing consolidates in two lines an interest that is pursued in many of the poems in Fractured Flights. The collection consists of three sequences, concerning, in order, Miss La La (a trapeze artist painted by Degas), the owl in folk history and the flight from emotion. The first sequence dramatises this theme - as does the circus where the body literally takes a leap of faith through nothingness - with free verse monologues articulating LaLa's fear and Degas' exploitation of this fear: 'I shut my eyes to see it'. The artist presented here is only interested in the event for its metaphorical value, and this is a precursor of the techniques employed in the next two sequences, the progression of the interest, in Part Two, into the Owl as icon, totem and lore, and in Part Three where the metaphor is not embodied in an image but in daily life and relationships. The Owl in this sequence is an omen. It is 'spotted' and 'collected' and is seen before or after sex or at a moment of danger, 'an unleashed Rottweiler that launched itself at her chest-high' or in the poem 'Barn' where it is has been shot by a farmer 'as it had frightened cows… and spoilt milk for days on end' and pinned up on the barn wall to watch 'the man and Mrs Toole'…'her kittenish mews that sounded like distress'. This Owl is part of the event it predicted. Art has become life just as LaLa's life became Degas' art. The poems in part three are a loose gathering of similar poems mostly about family. 'A Triptych for mum' is written in the voice of an elderly woman in a nursing home. This is a moving sequence of poems, the first a dramatic monologue, which follows the thought process of its subject convincingly. The second contrasts with the first, detailed use of indirect speech returning to the third person. We are told she is 'angry today like Jesus in the temple'… 'a cross little Crimplene / mum, a furious, stained Crimplene Christ. / Impossible to comfort. Her tea, too hot. Too cold.' The final section is the poet's response to a question from her son as to whether she would ever forget their holiday, ' the sight of it: / that carved Christ strapped somehow to a real live donkey.' She asks herself 'How could I ever forget?' poignantly reflecting on her mother's condition. This is a simple and effective poem like many in this collection, subtle and emotionally accurate. They really do attempt to tell how it feels and very often succeed.

Patterns in the Dark Mary Sheepshanks
ISBN 0 906744 23 7
New edition 2002      44pp     £5.50
Fighting Cock Press, 2 Vernon Road, Heckmondwicke, West Yorkshire WF16 9LU, England

Reading these poems is a bit like being hit on the head with a baton. Mary Sheepshanks' voice is energetic and entertaining. Mostly they are light verse poems bouncing along in jangly iambics but they are deafening to the point that any subtly is lost. Much of the phrasing is arch: 'to all the air I vainly cried' in the 'Bird of Loving' and from 'Interior Decoration', 'a floral chintz with a delicate air' - this last phrase summarizing neatly the register of many of the poems, as they are distinctly 'chintzy' the language embroidered and extravagant: 'was it a comfort to you, your faithful, disciplined, pew-steady churchianity?' from 'Time to Straighten your Tie'. This quality is acknowledged by Sheepshanks in another poem 'Rhymes': 'those who read my lines / risk laminitis.' It is these occasional moments of self-awareness and honesty that add depth to the poems and it is in these moments that a murmur of the quieter more reflective poetic voice is heard. The poems with a more considered tone are engaging; there is much inventiveness behind these poems but it is cloaked in false phrases and over-loud diction. There are, perhaps, too many abstract adjectives but some poems are sparser and these have a greater resonance. In 'Lent' Sheepshanks ability with rhythm is used effectively, building neatly to the final line, and is built around a strong central image: 'one daffodil / kicks up its skirts / in wild erotic / pagan dance.' Having both 'wild' and 'erotic' may be unnecessary, but there is here an image that surprises. In the poem 'James's School' a reason for the need for high kicks is made clearer. She writes quite eloquently: 'Shadows are not / to loiter here, where optimism / is a five-hundred watt bulb / and despondency gets vacuumed up / each time it tries to settle.' Perhaps if allowed to settle than these poems would not need a five-hundred watt bulb, as it is they are effervescent

The Constancy of Stone John Duffy
ISBN 0 9543862 0 5
Published 2002     36pp     £5
Nepotism Press, 3 Queens Road, Edgerton, Huddersfield, West Yorkshire HD2 2AG, England

The Constancy of Stone is a retelling of 'Derdriu of the Sorrows', a part of the ancient Irish saga 'The Tain Bo Cauilnge' to quote Duffy's helpful introduction, 'a heroic tale from a cattle herding and warrior culture.' His description of how he came to write these poems is illuminating, and although his reasoning could be deduced from his narrative choices, this straight-forward, honest opening allows for a clearer reading. His retelling of the story is motivated by a desire, he tells us, to include Derdriu's perspective within the narrative and not present her as the subject of the poem, but to let her have a voice. The voice he creates for her is one that articulates a dark sexuality, rape and violence. Derdriu is still a symbol - as all characterizations are - but one that now encompasses a contemporary understanding of sexuality. Whether this is Derdriu's voice is debatable, but in re-imagining this story Duffy suggests a sexuality that is aware of its own nature. The language he has chosen for his retelling is romantic 'her lips sweet berries, / teeth white in the warm dark / two plaits like finest needlework, / fell straight to frame her face, brush her breasts.' They make speeches that on occasion sound like they could have been taken from an historical romance! ' The King of Alba has offered me his wealth / the pleasure of his bed, queen's power / and if I go to him, he promises me / your freedom.' Yet this effect, perhaps, is intended to heighten the contrast with the violent and the more visceral moments, such as the description of her birth: 'The woman's breath was hunting dog's / her eyes on his hand between her hands / resting on her belly.' This central narrative is interrupted by a series of contemporary poems laid out so they are read as part of the main text. They do not always complement the main plot. In some places the connection is thematic and in others an attempt has been made to match tone with tone. The writing here is less stylised. In fact it rejects most devises and is a simple free verse and provides an interesting contrast. In 'Mecca' Duffy writes a scene that echoes the main narrative with a love affair between Ashfaq and Shahida, and 'Travellers at Mass' a simple observational poem: 'Shoulder to shoulder, in faded stone / combat jackets, three young women confront the careful priest'. The story of Derdriu tells the story of the struggle between tribes within the dominant society and in his clear-eyed observational poems Duffy is acting on the same impulse. This is a very valid and ambitious attempt to re-imagine an ancient story and connect it convincingly with the present.

The Shut Drawer Liz Almond
ISBN 1 900072 35 1
Published 2002     64pp      £6.95
Arc Publications, Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road, Todmorden, Lancashire OL14 6DA, England

The poems in The Shut Drawer face the world from a multitude of angles, altering perspective and stance within a moment but securing it within a structure that can withstand this attitude. They put me in mind of the poetic strategies of the Irish Poet, Medbh McGuckian, with whom Almond shares an interest in representing the Feminine. What differs are that Almond's poems are less romantic and grounded in the day to day, her family life and her childhood. Almond's is a family life seen through this factoring process and written in free verse poems that lilt with assonantal vowels smoothing lines, running the edges into the whole. This happens in 'Moving House' where the theme and strategy come together, 'it's the house that moves, / it thins, becomes / flimsy like a Japanese tea house, translucent, / with veins apparently/ bruised, swollen, sluggish...' and again in 'personal growth': 'when you die they lay you straight / no twist or turns, uncurled forever, / upwards, to the curl / whose call is pure spiral.' This demonstrates another of Almond's techniques. She creates oppositions between shapes to represent a thought process. These oppositions are again explored in 'Breast is Best' where the contradictory images of femininity are morphed into one creature - a woman almost medusa-like - whose 'girl-twin thrives, the boy-twin's chilled/with under nourishment.' She is a mother whose lover 'tears the bodice from my damp cleavage' when she is 'dressed to kill with a naked baby on my knee'. It is this paradox that lends the poem its concluding 'I try to express myself better than before'. The suggestion is that her anger is a result of her contrary position. This is the root of her aesthetic as each of these poems is an act of un-entanglement. They strive for clarity but do not idealise it, because they value the representation of contradiction for its own sake, as a poetic strategy, and as an act of self-assertion. In 'The Salmon Coloured Dress' the speaker is unsure if she is a fish, and would like to take off her skin, her naturalness, as 'she can't remember why / the salmon-coloured dress / belongs to her or she to it.' Femininity in these poems does not belong to her and she is unsure what would be left if she were to remove it. Perhaps just anger, perhaps a fish! The twists and turns of these poems represent the complexities of selfhood and gender with skill and vision.

From a Cliff Andy Brown
ISBN 1 900072 31 9
Published 2002     58pp      no price
Arc Publications, Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road, Todmorden, Lancashire OL14 6DA, England

In these poems philosophical concepts are approached with a lyrical voice. Either they use literary devices to discuss ideas or are discursive, allowing the first person to reflect upon the question posed. In this they are aware of the tradition of English poetry and, although written in free verse and modern in diction and rhythm, they are metaphysical and use the lyric as a vehicle for thought. 'Yesterday unfolds tomorrow with today's hands' is the opening line of 'Cavatina' which continues '…A shifting land / where feeling most at home approaches / stillness'. The personification of time is a standard literary device, the qualifying line introduces a metaphor used throughout the poems of the land as a location for ideas, and perhaps their ontology. In 'The Thread' in the 'Land' section of the book, the lines are more metrically regular and more compact: 'long before we see the swallows find their way / back home, we sense their coming in our blood'. This is a traditional comparison: air is abstract, land is physical and these poems seem comfortable in this. In 'A Lifting Wreck', the boat is well evoked: ' She came off the rocks at night, by remote / islands in a coastal bay - black as far as / I could see the zooplankton blooming / in luminescent drifts & pods of whales, / more accurate than maps, following their / prey.' These images are not overburdened by meaning. Brown is very aware of this difficulty in writing convincing metaphysical poetry when he acknowledges in 'Spawning Ground' that 'ideas fatten & mature / only to return and die soon after.' The approach he takes to writing about philosophical questions is discursive. 'The Matter Rests' begins: 'There's an old Chinese saying. Before one dies, / one tells the truth. Okay, but when? That calls / for a beer…' and concludes after acknowledging that 'things and words get in the way', 'not that anyone is paying any attention; it is years before we see what we have.' This is an observation on which many of the poems in this section end. After wandering about in abstractions they return back down to earth as in 'Landscape with Mountains' which also begins with a question 'Who am I? That's a good question, but before we can tackle it, please submit it / in writing, in triplicate, giving us time / to find another story.' The other stories are the voice of the Lyric drowning out the chatty urbane note struck at the start. After travelling through 'the high meadows…there in the distance, the harbour catches / the last light, to the clatter of rigging. / Lovers line the seawall, blind to all but the sea. / Now, about that question…' The question has already been answered and poetry is shown to be the stronger force.

New and Selected Poems Sarah Day
ISBN 1 900072 74 2
Published 2002     80pp      no price
Arc Publications, Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road, Todmorden, Lancashire OL14 6DA, England

This book collects together poems from all three of Sarah Day's previous collections, and each of the sections shows a change in her style. Her poetic strategies in the earlier poems are based in the free association of images; some poems explore this idea explicitly in their theme as in 'Cycles' and 'Chaos' and others in their form and language. In 'Handles to the Invisible' each of the five sections are connected by their atmosphere and a change in tone. The poem acknowledges the unconscious and finds metaphors in 'words on broken crockery, some half spoken, call up through the shallow water from the sea bed:/ KIN THE prophet defend Phyllis', and then she qualifies her metaphor 'This is the subtext, unsung, obscured / by sand. Shell…' This, and many of the earlier poems are interested in the subtext that is in meaning that is created by associations. She reaches this conclusion and moves away from it turning, her attention to situations and events. The poems from the second section, 'Quickening', are written with a centred voice that uses its knowledge of the processes prior to language to explore the present world. 'Train Watching' is a gentle poem. 'Come, we will shadow skulk like alley cats / to the station, seek shade and a memory / of coolness from an ancient stream.' The poem 'Wallaby' takes an interesting attitude to a road kill that 'reclines, graceful, on the bitumen / to the side of the road'. The wallaby is dying it seems, yet the control and delicacy of the language convinces as the wallaby watches the world fade before its eyes. These middle poems are transitional; still encompassing the wide eyed vision of the earlier excited poems, but steadying the gaze upon the world and the details of the day to day. By the section 'New Poems' her style has become discursive, the line endings more controlled and consistent. The interest in the poem for Day now is its relationship to the outside world, how the things of this world can be apprehended. Day is confident enough in this to present a question and not feel the need to answer it. She tries to let the place speak for itself. As she says in 'Undermining': 'this was the quietening down of the day / a scene around a coal fire / perched above centuries of hauling, / women mending, pegging rugs from old scraps, unspeaking community of busy fingers.' There is 'quietening down' in these later poems and set in contrast to the earlier work they complete what is a varied and rewarding collection.