"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)

"The Europeans" by David Clarke (Nine Arches Press, 2019)

Poems from Magma, Strix, etc. The source material's partly from the media and reference books.

I'm not that keen on themed collections especially on contemporary themes. But I was impressed by David Clarke's previous collection, my kids are bilingual (Italian - one of them now lives in Sweden), so this book interested me.

It starts well with "Invitation" which begins with "Meet me in the lobby of the Hotel Europa", with some recognisable characters, though there are some strange details and the ending is "And if we've ever cause to quit the Hotel Europa,/ let us not be consumed by recrimination/ and regret. Call it a dream,/ a happy accident. If you must, a lie.", which goes beyond observation. The next poem, "Letter in March", has an ababccdd rhyme scheme. It's more low key, more disappointing. There's more formalism later - "In the Snug" is a loose villanelle, "To a Mellotron" is abcdbefgh abcdbefgh, "To a stately home" uses terza rima, etc.

There are a few flat poems around p.30. I don't understand "Auden at Kirchstetten", though I know something of Auden's later years. "Sugar town" puzzles me.

Poems are addressed to pubs, stately homes, villages, TV, and phoneboxes ("I inhaled your reek of ash and piss ... untwisted your tarnished flex, flicked the squeaky flap for change". We see England at its most distinctive. I wasn't especially taken by any poem as a whole, though there are many appealing fragments. Here are a few -

• In blank verse "An Exchange" recounts an exchange visit - "The final BBQ was underdone,/ of course, but then some rebel spiked those beers/ that left us gassy on the coach and queasy/ lurching from Zeebrugge's quay. And England/ loomed, a salty headache in the dawn"
• "When the winter came, the Europeans were retreated/ into forests. People were wolves or wolves/ were people. These matters were increasingly unclear." ("The Europeans")
• "You could still put your finger// into the bullet holes in the masonry, just as a violin started/ up in that apartment over the café. The Europeans/ had much to say of poetry and much silence to say it into." ("The Europeans")
• "You knew that glamorous angst/ of sin-soaked quays and modernist salons, those anti-/ heroes tracing sweat-pricked lips with a brush of thumb" (p.15)
• "No doubt, I'm not the first to search the city/ for some sign, to scan its past in celluloid/ for that café where I may meet the guide// who's dodged me all my waking life -/ even while a surgeon elsewhere rubs/ his weary eyes, holds my x-rays to the light" (p.16)
• "the spinning punctuation of/ your fruit machines that trilled, mesmeric in the gloom/ between a first necked pint and each man's lonesome trudge// for home " (p.18)
• "At night/ their spires are styluses/ that scratch a dirge from heaven's/ whirling acetate" (p.25)

Typo on p.46 - "I am a solider"

"

Other reviews

• Ed Garvey-Long (If the Hotel is the poet’s metaphor for the European community, efficient, interesting and liberal, the Pub is poet’s metaphor for Englishness, isolated, bigoted, intoxicated and divorced from reality. Alongside Pubs, the rain is a consistent theme and an easy shorthand for a lot of English experience. ... in exploring this big ideas and the anger surrounding them, I felt the poems themselves lacked an emotional engagement, outside of the anger that runs through the collection. There were a handful of personal moments, but overall the book was about exploring these large questions about Englishness and Europeanness, ultimately though enjoyable, I feel the collection could have done more to explore the poet’s personal connection with the subject matter.)
• Neil Fulwood (‘Letter to George Gordon Byron’ is a showstopper, ... ‘The Vision of Albion' [] is the poem that actually does close The Europeans and Clarke foregoes the earlier howl of furious protest for something quieter, deeper, more insistent; a perfect conclusion to a collection that doesn’t put a foot wrong.)
• Carol Rumens (The final station of the cross, Leeds Central, has a particularly brilliant opening line, with its hard-punching Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: “Saw that bloke from that band you liked” and that almost physically cruel rhyme, “liked” and “spiked”. The quatrain ends with a gentler cadence, and a repetition of sounds (“eternal return”) that is like a fading spell. The return ticket expires. Places are seen for the last time. Relationships end. As ever, the poet chooses candour over consolation.)
• Anna Lewis (For all its sharp observations, the poetry is warm and playful in tone, its ambition to understand rather than accuse)

"Arc" by David Clarke (Nine Arches Press, 2015)

Poems from "Under the Radar", "New Walk", "Interpreter's House", "Antiphon", "Magma" etc. It's a thick book of formally varied, mostly long-lined poems some of which ("Sword-swallowing for beginners", "A Family Romance") I think I've seen and liked before.

The first poem, "Throw" is offered as a prelude, so I think it's fair to mine it for symbols. A throw can be an attempt, or one can throw a pot, or throw (i.e. deliberately lose) a game. Here the beginning is "I am the boy who threw the ball/ into summer's empty mouth/ then saw there was no void at all". The ball eclipsed the sun. Then at the end "I squinted to see where it would land,/ running forward with empty hands". So, aiming high, the narrator masked nature with play. In the end he only communicated with himself, but a self that's advancing to catch the past. Advancing where?

Perhaps the main route ahead is illustrated by two of the more typical poems - "Exodus" (9 3-lined stanzas) and "From Here" (5 4-lined stanzas). They both accumulate pathetic-fallacy detail, adding the odd emotional direction. The latter for example has description - "a lane that gestures weakly to hills ... while in the garden three plastic chairs,/ arranged to seat a council of summer's ghosts,/ fill up with lichen pools of shivering stuff./ Streetlights morse on-off as evening nears" - and mood - "I have an itch in my heart to be out of here" and "At the proper distance I might observe this place that mugs it up as fate, though some would call it a coward's choice". Both are using the surroundings as a platform for change.

The titles of the 4 subsections are perhaps signposts too -

• "Epic Fail" - Bathos, the ambition of youth. Plato and cakes. Superman. Orpheus getting a coffee. Coping with insults. "Lyre" is interesting.
• "Permanent Emergency" - Perhaps that's to be read more as "permanent emergence". The subtitle poem repeats "We find ourselves". A developmental phase. Moustaches. Revolution. Family trees.
• "Arcadia" - "a vision of pastoralism and harmony with nature", according to Wikipedia. Travelling, being contented.
• "From Here" - so, what next? More about homes and greenhouses. One poem's entitled "Domestic Gods" and "The Gloucestershire Echo" is "A cut-price oracle, succour to the outraged ... rammed into jacket pockets by scoundrels leaving public houses ... never complains of creases, crumbs, or unattributed stains ... A literary mayfly, transience is its element - who else expresses such conviction with oblivion at their back?". I like "than you expected"

The one-off pieces (and there are several) work well. I liked "A Journey" for example,

I've probably missed quite a lot of the formal patterning (syllabics aren't my forte for a start) but I noticed that "Reading Habits" is "abba", "Lenin at the Music Hall" is "aa", "Driving Back to Lincolnshire for a Funeral" is "abccba", the lines of "For Hanna on her 50th Birthday" have end-words that all start with "d" and have an "r", "Dear Superman" has a first verse with "ababbcbcc" end-rhymes (a pattern mirrored in the 2nd stanza) and that a similar idea is used in at least 2 other poems. There are sonnets too.

Other reviews, etc

• an interview with Sarah James
• Robert Peake