As far as I can see, there are no reprints from her 2016 pamphlet "The dogs that chase bicycle wheels" - an indication of pamphlets' increasing respectability. In this book there are poems from Compass, Fenland Journal, Magma, North, Stand, etc. The subject matter of the book roughly follows this sequence: Student Vet - Farms - Impersonal - Family in Childhood - Family History - Family in Adulthood - Mature Vet - Mother. Threaded through these are recurrent themes - communication, death, mother-child bond, etc. The book deserves to do well - it contains many good poems.
The Launch
At the launch on 13th July, 2021, she said that the title alludes to a more general concern with listening that starts with the first poem of the book, "Visit to the Vets". She said that the poem Auscultation's irregular rhythm emulates the rhythm of a heart about to stop (which I hadn't realised). The King in the step-mother poems is the judge in a prolonged court case she attended.
I guess at readings poets pick the more accessible pieces. The Zoom audience thought the pieces moving, which wasn't surprising given much of the subject matter - the technique never obscured the message. The book has a much wider range than that though.
In the launch's Q+A session she suggested that the "Vet" theme may become generalised into a "Bodies" theme.
Vet
There's more to being a vet than looking after animals. As "Visit to the Vet" shows, one needs to cope with the owners too. And mortality isn't far away, even if it's not spoken about. "Teach me how to kill" begins with natural materials - wood and chalk - "Sit me down on a wooden bench/ and let me hear the scream/ of chalk on blackboard". By the end, the persona says "Teach me the tricks/ of the trade, how to kill and then carry on". "All this accumulation of knowledge" lists other subsidary skills.
Even the instruments gradually become animalised - "Mosquito forceps ... rat tooth forceps... crocodile forceps" (Surgical Instruments). At times, vet and animal might begin to share experiences - "We both strain to birth" ("The Calving").
Subject matter
It's easy to believe that most of the poems are based on real-life. ("CaCO3" being amongst a cluster of exceptions). Even poems like "From space - a burning heart" have a biology viewpoint. It's usually easy to see what her poems are "about". It may only be a prop to be discarded after use, but there's no harm offering a helping hand to readers and reviewers. If the poet's autobiography is involved with a theme, so much the better. Readers like connecting with the person behind the words (I once wrote a 9-word piece called "Reviewers and Doctors" - "They both want to listen to your heart first.")
But "aboutness" isn't univerally popular. I've heard poets say of a poem of theirs that "If I knew what it's about I wouldn't have written it." Perhaps "Meditations" has the least aboutness, with stanzas like "A house with no doors shows us an honesty/ or maybe thoughts too complex to fill the gaps,/ we tack up sheets in the frames/ while we contemplate separation".
Several poems report an incident. The treatment can sometimes be rather factual (e.g. "The Calving", "Roadblock"), imagery-rich ("Chiropractic") or a blend, but the reader never loses sight of the events, the mood always convincingly depicted. It's never poetry for poetry's sake - it's always on a mission.
Forms
Having seen her poems at some monthly workshops, its the variety of techniques rather than similarity of theme that's most striking. Like all good experiments they don't always lead to publication. In the book are poems in several shapes -
- "The Importance of Air" is a sestina
- "Castrating Calves" is a Golden Shovel
- "CaCO3 is an anagrammatic poem: the end of the line in each couplet is an anagram"
- "The Hill Ewe's Pasture" is 14 10-syllabled lines - a sonnet.
- "Behind City Doors" is a pantoum
- "Mothering" is a villanelle.
- There are poems without line-breaks
Adumbration/repetition
I've a prejudice against chants - it's too easy a way to poetize prose. Mostly the examples in this book were justified -
- "Visit to the Vets" has lines that begin with "I'm listening when". It works.
- In "Ploughing", the lines end in "turn[s]". It works.
- "Unmade" repeatedly uses "I come from a place" which is less convincing
- "The silence is" repeats "The silence is" followed by spaces before the next word - e.g. "The silence is awkward"
- "Voicemail" uses "I need"
- "The Queen Bee" repeats "I'd been wanting to tell you all weekend" (about being pregnant?!)
Waiting
In "The Thief" the family group are "Suspended in the familiarity of waiting" (an example of the unobtrusive poetic phrasing common in the book). The waiting continues in "The silence is" and appears in other poems. It's usually ominous. In "Roadblock" "The night is a vast blank letter waiting/ to be written". The "Waiting Room" is "a scratched grey box/ that stinks of sweat and desperation". In "Statues", parents wait on the doorway, saying goodbye to a child who glances back, the parents like statues awaiting the child's return.
Animals
There are several risks associated with writing about animals, all of which I think she's avoided -
- The temptation to follow fashion and write about honey bees, city foxes, whales, endangered species, etc.
- Mentioning exotic pets
- Using anthropomorphism, or exploiting pet-lovers' rather vulnerable heart-strings.
- Jellyfish Review tweeted on 22/6/21 that "There is an entire genre of flash fiction called 'I learnt a new fact about animals and I think I'm going to write a story about it'". The poet avoids that temptation too.
Many of the animals are parents. The "Hill Ewe" (a mother who's part of a long chain of mothers) returns home each year. The returning persona doesn't feel part of a tradition. In the next poem the persona slips away, unnoticed.
Birds and distance
Birds merit a special mention in animal poetry. She uses them several times -
- "The Thief" - The narrator visits a very sick person in hospital who may be "lulled by the birdsong of hums and beeps". Then "Back home we watched a magpie seize a blackbird nestling", the bird parents "recklessly battered the thief with their wings,/ small fists beating against your chest"
- "Wildlife" - an owl rejects the safety of a cage. There's a ghost of an owl in "The Year I lost my voice"
- "Jesus and the Snorty Pigs" begins with "You had a magpie's eye for the religion they offered"
- "Snipe of the Woods" - a migrating bird crashes into a high-rise when so close to its destination - "we gather round and wonder why it missed what was in front of it"
- In "Lines of Communication" "birds dip and arrow away from their young" (to protect their young by tricking predators?). The narrator (a parent) thinks about telegraph lines, and how calls to children no longer need a physical link - "Today the bird thinking danger is over/ returns to her nest and finds it empty"
- In "Every other weekend" crow's nests are compared to crowds of lawyers, squabbling.
Birds are used to symbolise communication across distances. There are also letters and phonecalls. In contrast the father has maps.
Miscellaneous
- "A Smaller Man" starts with "He was a smaller man when I saw him again, his clothes one size too big" which makes the title rather redundant. It used to be called Autumn peas
- Why are the lines of "Wildlife" so short? It's one of the more prosey pieces. And the final sentence's comma causes a run-on.
- "From Darkness" doesn't work for me.
- I missed "The Wish" on a first read. I like it.
- As time passes, I find I like the student vet poems more, and the step-mother poems ("The Year in the Forest", "Waiting Room") less.
See also
Other reviews
- Kate Ashton (To read Ilse Pedler’s collection is to be fully awoken to the concept of our ‘stewardship’ of the Earth. ... compassion, courage and conciliation are the hallmarks of this lovely, unaffected and affecting first collection.)
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