"The field in winter" by David Clarke (Nine Arches Press, 2023)

Poems from Fenland Reed, Atrium, Under the Radar, etc

Over half the poems have a Shakespearian sonnet structure, both visually - 3 quatrains and a couplet - and conceptually. Imagery and pensées abound -

• A stork's "Flight is an unfurling -/ the body's grubby parasol/ flung into the heavens" (p.15). I think I've seen this comparison before.
• When the persona doesn't want to kill a spider, "What is this wish// for riddance without harm?/That feeling finally needs a name" (p.17)
• Flies - "All summer they'd filled this room, summoned from nothing like nasty thoughts" (p.18) - too abstract, too irrelevant
• A dead, taut-skinned mouse, fly-infested "birthed these other furious lives -/ it grimaced from the effort" (p.18)
• "A great yew bucks and thrashes like a bear/ in chains. Cudgelled by blasts of grey air,/ it flashes grim and powerless paws" (p.19)
• "Hills swell, shift their sodden/ coats about old shoulders, sigh" (p.20)
• "Now the twilight is made of birds./ They hoard the shadow in these crowns/ and call down night with urgency" (p.22)
• Because of fog, "This morning there is no world/ beyond the end of our street/ Each house is a model of itself,/ too precise to be believed ... a flock of doves careens - // a whiteness made from whiteness ... a conjuror who shows us/ the nothing in his hand" (p.24
• More fog - "The road has unlearned the shape I knew" (p.28)
• "White blades divide the air ... They have the drone of prayer-wheels// which we may hope to turn/ in absence of final answer" (p.32)
• "An A-road roars beneath,// a hissing flow of metal -/ the movement we have invented/ to not be still with our selves" (p.32)
• "How we long for labour like this -/ to lose your days in the making of life,/ to honey the air with our joy" re bees, sounds rather twee
• "Against the mind's hard no, a surge of now" (p.54)
• "That stump is buried half inside/ a bank ... like an ancient flint harpoon scarred into a whale's thick hide ...it juts -/ a last grey tooth inside a sinner's head " - I don't get the "sinner" idea

No fireworks. Likeable. I like "The Field in Spring" and "Before the Plum Harvest". "The Word box" has the feel of Heaney's "Digging" - a son's words vs a father's tools. It ends with "His tools are idle in the dark. I make/ no sense, but take the measure of grief/ and find my work is always out of true"

Other reviews

• Jean Atkin (Often in David Clarke’s poems, we are at the edge of being lost, ... where lives (animal and human) are lived on the brink. There is a lot of weather)