"Threat" by Julia Webb (Nine Arches Press, 2019)

Her first collection appeared only 3 years ago, but thanks to a full-time involvement with literary life she's managed to garner accolades since - highly commended in the Forward, a poem in a Bloodaxe anthology, etc. She has gathered contacts too - Pascale Petit and Heidi Williamson read the manuscript. She hasn't rested on her laurels, as the dozens of publications in the Acknowledgements show - Ambit, Fenland Reed, Oxford Poetry, Under the Radar, etc.

Her first book title, "Bird Sisters", brought together a now derogatory 60s term for women with a more recent term signifying female solidarity. Some of that sixties sexism (along with the owls) persists in "Threat", which sounds more ominous than the first title (though crossworders might see "Treat" and "heart" lurking in the title).

On the back cover it says that "Threat" tells "how it feels to be a girl living in small town ... A girl whose body grows into a woman’s shape and becomes instant prey to the lurkers in bars. ... the dark and sometimes brutal undertow of small-town life seeps to the surface". This could also describe several stories in "Fen", a short story collection by Daisy Johnson (Vintage, 2017). In an interview Johnson said "That’s what I wanted to explore, I think, being a young woman in the middle of nowhere. And the Fens was the perfect place for that. It’s so flat you can see everything coming. It’s a land that dreams of water." In "Fen" (as in "Bird Sisters" and to a lesser extent "Threat") the borders between Nature, animals and humans are porous. There are village pubs where there's always a chance of an easy lay, and animals with supernatural powers.

In contrast to the Fens (though still in East Anglia), The Brecks is one of the driest parts of Britain ('Brecks' were fields cultivated for a few years and then allowed to revert to heath once the soil became exhausted). Thetford, the setting for several of these poems, is in this area. I liked Thetford on a first visit. The Priory Grounds are impressive, and there's a pleasant river walk. The Norman motte is substantial, and the Three Nuns Bridges interesting. There's a life-size bronze of non-threatening Captain Mainwaring to sit beside.

That's not the Thetford of these poems, which is stuck in the 70s-80s and has more in common with Johnson's Fens, the pre-gastro pubs especially - Fen's "Fox and Hounds" is Threat's "King's Head". When it got dark early and there were no late buses where else was there to go? "Roly is on the floor gyrating, his ageing mum in her leather jacket is leaning against the wall" (p.67). It has a forest whose trees are straight, tall and in lines - not the ancient woodland of fairy tales. "The language of home hurts my mouth" mentions"the shush of pines; shoulder to shoulder silence, shoulder to shoulder dark".

Then, as now, society's expectations affected the behaviour of males and females. Norms were enforced. If boys didn't treat girls the way they're supposed to, they'd be bullied. Boys were boys, and girls' roles had to reflect that. There were allowable ways to be different - the Arts for example - but in those days, especially in a small town, such opportunities were few. Whatever their reasons for rebelling, pre-social-media rebels ended up bundled together - in the pub or public toilets.

This threat to self-actualisation, coupled with family issues and the bodily changes of adolescence and middle age (when "the body does not consider your feelings" - p.11) all provide challenges, most evident in the "Tell me more lies about love" section where men are on the look out for vulnerable women young and old. In "Good Friday" the (female) narrator's submissive, to her partner's delight. "The Moth" and "Public Bar, Central Hotel" show men's views/behaviour regarding women most starkly. Sexes are differentiated and there's no in between. "Girl's School" - "We are cows" (p.32) - opposes "Grammar School Boys" - "They ... make legends of each other" (p.39).

How does the Self react to these pressures?

• By re-assessing relationships that once defined it - Mother is viewed as father's doll (p.57), an owl (p.61), a nuisance phone call (p.62), an unbaked loaf (p.63), a public bar/barmaid (p.66).
• By inviting others on its own terms, even if that leads to rejection and disappointment - in "carport" "my mouth is a carport with a broken light ... you prefer to hang around/ in the street revving your engine ... there is a chest freezer by the back door./ It is full of something dead".
• By re-assessing current relationships - "Consultation" ends with "you're better off without him ... She wipes the crumbs off the counter, offers you another slice of cake". In the next poem, "Love is mostly about validation ... perhaps, I can believe in myself ... you must first start believing in the solidarity of the self". Following that the narrator has a motel party with the moon and passes out - time for a change?
• By absorbing, changing from within - "something inside me broke" (p.18). In "Moon Party" "you are full of the moon/ it is bursting out from inside you" whereas in "you are on fire" "you have accidentally swallowed the sun". In the final poem, "all the women, all the women are inside me now ... I speak acorns and buttresses/ I speak water lilies and doves ... I open my book beak and inadvertently sing". It sounds like progress.

The book's organised into 4 broadly thematic sections within which there are mini-sequences and one-offs - a pleasing mix of predictability and surprise. The earlier poems in the first section, "Body of Evidence", begin none too merrily. Chaining together titles or first lines gives "the body does not consider your feelings ... Step outside of yourself he said, and I did ... the way as he looked into your eyes you closed them ... you have made my house a circus ... If I hadn't swallowed the kettle ... She was a biscuit barrel ... Good Friday was the day I chopped off my own head". The self tends not to recover by the poem's end. The next section, "Tell Me More Lies About Love" sees things for what they are. "Family and Other Distractions" reviews the family and familiar haunts - the "Resurrect" poem is a false dawn. The final "Evidence of Body" section begins with an optimistic quote - 'The light has bored out of the body's long house' - and reaches a hard-won, contented conclusion.

Much as some people use role-play to explore aspects of self, the narrator employs extended analogy as illustrated in "Kettle", which isn't just a list of Martian metaphors - there's a story-arc. The narrator begins by comparing herself to a kettle - "If I hadn't swallowed the kettle/ maybe I wouldn't have boiled myself dry". Perhaps "swallowed the kettle" means "done the domestic chores". Later "My wire is dangling over the toaster again ... those tiny bits of limescale/ like flecks of dandruff" then "your razor plugged into the kettle socket" and "My gauge is so scaled up/ there's no telling what my capacity is" - domesticity thwarting development.

Several of the more experimental pieces are near the start. Some pieces are formatted as prose. "Resurrect" is a loose sonnet. A few poems (p.75, p.77) use "/" instead of line-breaks. If you want to read poems from this book go to Atrium where you'll find "The language of home hurts my mouth", "The Doll", "Your mother is landlady of the dead house", and "All the Women". Or watch a video of Lightening Up. In a Nine Arches Press interview she talks about "Bus Station Toilets" - "Most adults who grew up in the seventies or eighties will be able to recount some kind of happening – good or bad – that occurred in school or public toilets. Toilets were a place to share secrets and gossip, a place to smoke out of sight of adults, a place to put on make-up, to write graffiti, to cry over a break-up, to try out drugs, to hide when skiving off school, a place to hide from bullies – or to be found by them."

Favourites? "Kettle", "The Doll", "All Shades of Empty", "expansion of", "All the Women". Gripes? Well, being a person who writes little, and only when I feel like it, I'm suspicious of practises that help poets squeeze out more words. Several poems are "after" someone or something. Several poems use anaphora ("spilling", "Elegy", "Bus Station Toilets", "Public Bar, Central Hotel", "Love Poem to Loneliness"). "Sleight of Hand" is too slight. And I wonder how much more there is to extract from the memory mines of Thetford.

Other reviews

• Nicola Heaney (In the first section, ‘Body of evidence’ the poems have a sinister tinge ... The last two sections are more abstract in description as Webb moves from the immediacy of these events and begins to look backwards. This gives these poems a lighter feel and the collection ends on a much more positive note )
• Atrium featured publication
• Mark Connors
• Stella Blackhouse