"Water Sessions" by James Lasdun (Cape, 2012)

Poems from The Atlantic, LRB, Poetry, TLS etc.

I probably don't understand most of these pieces - "Instead", "The Blight", "The Question", "To a pessimist" for example seem slight to me, and might as well be prose. A common template is a title using Greek/Biblical myths, a sophisticated male narrator, a loose rhyme scheme, and a disclosure that beneath the suave (albeit aging) exterior there are baser instincts. Some poems are about his reactions to his father's death. Several poems compare the present with a moment in the past.

• I like "The Skaters", how various social classes enjoy the "sheer effortless rapture" of an ice-rink's "frictionless surface" which "turns to a thick, grey, gravelly slurry which, we have to admit, is easier going, maybe because it reminds us, though for a moment, the page of ice still bare, we're just like them again".
• Poems like "Woodpile", about the value of mundane work, have been written by many people. I don't think this effort ("Mindless work - stooping, grabbing, chucking, stacking - but I like it: the guaranteed satisfaction, the exact ratio of effort to result; how you can't fail at this if you put in the effort", etc) is more noteworthy than many others about weeding, DIY, ironing, etc.
• "The Watcher" is a little observation that could pad out a good novel. The rhyme scheme is "abcbabc", "glance" and "dolphins" an example of his loose rhyming.
• "Mr W.H." includes "Of course every poet/ appoints his own ancestors/ but that's one thing if you're Auden/ enlisting Byron, another/ if you're nobody claiming Auden"
• "The Event" may have wordplay - "whose heart lives in its aches as in a peachstone the fire of peaches" (my bold)
• "The Blueberries" combines past and present, beginning and ending with "I'm talking to you old man./ Listen to me as you step inside the garden/ to fill a breakfast bowl with blueberries/ ripened on the bushes I'm planting now ... This was your labour, these are the fruits thereof./ Fill up your bowl old man and bring them in."
• "The men question Tiresias" is fun, and rather funny. Microprose really.
• "Stones" returns to the "I like the drudgery" idea, this time with allusions to writing and whether it was all worthwhile - "trying to set these paths in stone", "the best stones in the best possible order", "making nothing happen"

Other reviews

• Adam Newey (That shift from outer landscape to inner is a familiar Lasdun manoeuvre, and the physical landscapes here – mostly New England, where he's lived for 25 years – are as sharply observed as ever. Observation, it seems, leads inevitably to introspection. ... the finest poem here, "Blueberries", which collapses time by having the speaker, planting fruit bushes in his garden, address himself 20 years on)
• Ben Wilkinson (The suggestion recurring throughout Water Sessions is that intelligent reflection, for all its merits and necessity, can result in paralysis. ... Not all of these poems are rivers winding and flowing; some are content to tread water, while a few vignettes peter out before they get started. Yet the book's opening poem, "The Skaters", a sweeping tale of punctured naivety in the face of life's vicissitudes and painful inevitabilities, is alone worth the price of entry. "It Isn't Me" will doubtless elicit a pang of recognition from many readers; "Blues for Samson", a candid but measured take on the capricious male libido, also deserves mention. In their reflective patter, formal dexterity, serio-comic tones and depth of feeling, these are the stand-out poems in an excellent book.)