I know the poet, I've seen several of the poems before, and I have visited many of the local places mentioned - Icknield Way, Fleam Dyke, Chippenham Fen, Over, Hardwick, Meldreth, Barrington, etc - so bias is inevitable here. The cover shows a man and a women apart in a graveyard that's dominated by a spreading tree. The first poem continues the cover's themes, suggesting that Nature might be the poet's religion. In the second poem with the poet lying "statue-still, belly pressed on damp grass" nature comes alive, culminating with "The sudden breeze that stirs white limbs and golden rods of sex, The water darkens and the cypress sighs".
Some poets compose on the train. Others, (Coleridge and Wordsworth for example) used the metrics of walking to help them compose. Goode is definitely a walker. The see-saw rhythm helps the words go down so easily that the images might not be noticed. Staccato free verse indicates to the reader where to stop to admire the images. Not so here. A case in point is the poem about Barrington, a village just outside Cambridge whose thatched cottages and pub don't attract the poet's attention. Here's the first stanza of "Barrington Quarry and Cement Works"
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The other side of Chapel Hill's shown blank. The map's as white as lime - the stuff they hacked to fill the kiln - seems contour free, no dip or climb, but fenced to guard the ignorant approach. |
I doubt that the mention of the hill's name is accidental. One approach to interpretation is to trust words. But hacked words, like maps, can lie - a trap for the ignorant. Yet the map gets the colour right. Later, "Some fennish envy of a rise/ has eaten half a ridge away". Later still an extra layer of history is added - "And now it too is fossilised./ The works are closed" - the cement works but also perhaps literary works.
It's easy to read the seasons as phases of life (made explicit in phrases like "We too are old,/ and our autumnal vigour by and by/ will fade" (p.26)), and birds as escape from the material world. In "Icknield Way - late winter" the walkers "are fixed fast, grow rooted. The clotting clay so weights our legs we are/ divers, shuffling in a sea of damp air" (another apt image). At the end "Dun flutter on a dark sky,// that's really not so dark, when once you look,/ but full of pallid brights and coloured hints,/ promise of lightness and of coming spring".
"Town Mouse and Country Mouse" introduces a lighter interlude. I like the "Gaunilo's Island" idea but not so much the poem. I like "On hearing the first full orchestral performance of John Cage's 4' 33"", especially the first stanza. The book ends with some longer, more serious pieces. "By fits and starts" completes the book. I think its themes are continuity vs quantisation, repetition vs sequence. It begins with an illusion to Zeno's arrow paradox -
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By fits and starts the arrow flies in grainy textured swift traverse. The tick, the tock, polymerise - it pierces |
If you slip out of life's flux into moments, if you try to figure things out, then
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Back into figured motion turns the death-dance, the endless da capo of repeated acts, the spinning pirns, the frenzied thrumming realm of Clotho, the dance of the machines,the office days |
A flash of love suspends the moment, then there's thunder, repetition re-asserted as rainfall.
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Now consciousness hold failing reign, so light it is, it does not sense time's growing gravity. The thinning skein, a surface strand, mere present tense |
Language and imagery
You might need a dictionary for this collection to look up words like indurations, metameric, implacable (p.3 and p.6), petroglyph, arraign, mortmain, fealty, tegmina, polymerise, magelianic, and pirns. You might need an encyclopedia too. Who's Nimue? What's Martinmas? Who's Clotho?
Where there are puns they aren't forced - "She stitched him up" (p.38) works well. There's unobtrusive compression - "This February land is winter wet" (p.14); "petals that are summer creased" (p.23). Phrases can be complex. I had trouble parsing "Burning air sucked from a furnace of fields/ and flung in gusts, the abeles' damp delights".(p.22). Abeles are white poplars. Is "Burning" an adjective or verb? Is "damp" a noun or an adjective? Is "delights" a verb or a noun?
Sometime the imagery falls back on standard models, apt though they are, e.g. "Holding your hand in the hospice,/ the wind outside labours/ to lift the branches of the ilex./ High up, invisible, a gull/ lets fall its plaintive cry". "the rushes whisper their secret song" (p.17) is onomatopaeic, but at a cost.
Forms
Rhyme-based forms abound -
- xaxa - p.13, 16
- abab - p.21, 32 (ending with cc), 34, 35, 36, 41, 50
- ababC - p.26, 31
- ababcc - p.20
- ababbcc, p.42
- abcdabcdee - p.4
- abcabc - p.10, p.30
- abcdabcd - p.25
- Shakespearean sonnet - 40
- abbaC - p.17
There are other types of form too. The stanzas on p.23 all start with "These poppies" and end with "the white wheat". The stanzas on p.24 begin with "Windward", "Upwards", "Downwards", "Leeward". The stanzas of "Heraclitus" all end with "in a dung heap". Here’s a section of "Against the Jostle and the Thrust"
Soil makers turn and sift as by shuffle
and whirr and veined wing caught in amber bright
or coal dark shaft and the settle and fold.
Tegmina, testa, bark, bristle and bone,
upright against pull, support for the push.
Arc guarding eye, skull, beak, talon and claw.
Skin soft Africa ape, with knowing thumb.
Enjambment across mountains, plains and seas,
stride far reaching covers dreams, covers worlds
A white zigzag cuts through these decametre lines. On each side of the divide are either T and A (e.g. “sift as"), or G and C (as in “wing caught"). Those letters are used by biochemists to symbolise the 4 bases of DNA, which only combine in the pairs the poem uses. The zigzag denotes the double-helix. The poem's final line is "and............", a mutation of DNA. This form had to be pointed out to me. I suspect I've missed much else too.
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